Samir Soni, who is
probably best known for his role in the television serial Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin, is making his directorial debut with My
Birthday Song—a psychological thriller starring Sanjay Suri, Norah Fatehi, and
Zenia Starr. The film revolves around a happily married man whose life turns
upside down when a ghost from his past returns to haunt him on his 40th
birthday. Now, Hindi cinema, unlike Hollywood, is not really known for making
psychological thrillers. Having said that, we did have some good films over the
last couple of decades such as Sangharsh
(1999), Kaun (1999), Ek Hasina Thi (2004), Being Cyrus (2005), No Smoking
(2007), and Karthik Calling Karthik
(2010) that kept the genre alive. But we don’t have many good examples in
the recent years. Among other things this downslide has to do with the poor
box-office performance of such films. While most of these films have gone on to
attain cult status, their immediate returns were below par. And so producers
are often reluctant to take risks. Of course, there are other reasons as well.

There is no doubt
whatsoever that making a good psychological thriller features amongst the most
difficult feats as far as filmmaking is concerned. Right from the ideation
stage the challenge is to come up with a story that can keep the viewer on the
edge of the seat. Unlike a regular thriller wherein the focus is on creating
adrenaline-pumping scenarios, in case of a psychological thriller there needs
to be a greater emphasis on aspects that can impact the viewer emotionally as
well as viscerally rather than intellectually. But that certainly doesn’t mean
that the logic can be compromised for the sake of eliciting strong emotional
and visceral responses. From the screenwriting point of view, the struggles and
conflicts need to be more internal than external. And herein lies the biggest
challenge, for it requires the filmmaker to provide the viewers with the access
to the convoluted minds of the characters that inhabit the film’s universe. The
filmmaker of course has a variety of cinematic tropes at his/her disposal to
manifest his creative design. But despite all the technological advances that
cinema has made in the recent years there is nothing that works better than the
good old editing techniques: Montage and Decoupage classique.

Nora Fatehi in My Birthday Song

While the latter deals
with rules of temporal and spatial continuity as established in Hollywood by
early American filmmakers like D.W. Griffith intended to achieve seamless
transitions between shots so that the focus is on the how the overall story
unfolds, the former is a technique made famous by Soviet filmmakers like Sergei
Eisenstein wherein two or more shots are edited together to give rise to a new
meaning with the idea of continuity taking a backseat. Now, Alfred Hitchcock, who
is hailed as the undisputed master of suspense in cinema, had attained a
mastery over these two editing techniques. Unlike filmmakers before him,
Hitchcock would employ both these techniques together to devastating effect.
Perhaps, the best example is his 1960 masterpiece Pyscho with its famous shower sequence unpinning Hitchcock’s unparalleled mastery
over film editing. The scene’s pacy editing is achieved by splicing over 75
pieces of film in 45 seconds. In the scene a woman is brutally stabbed to death
by a mysterious assailant while taking a shower but there isn’t an iota of
nudity; also the knife never really is seen touching the woman’s body and yet
we do witness a murder—one that only can be manifested cinematically.

Sanjay Suri in My Birthday Song

Now, Samir Soni’s choice
to begin his film direction career with a psychological thriller is certainly a
daring one. What makes it even more interesting is the fact that he has also
written and co-produced the film. Perhaps, no one else would have backed up a
debutant filmmaker embarking on a journey to make a psychological thriller with
an experimental narrative. As a matter of fact, My Birthday Song is nothing
like anything seen before in Hindi cinema. Here is a film that employs
Hitchcockian techniques to weave a Kafkaesque nightmare with surrealistic
motifs that one would come across in works of David Lynch. But the novelty is
not only limited to the narrative, for the camerawork, editing, and soundscape
too have a certain avant-garde quality about them that we seldom get to see in
contemporary Bollywood films. The USP of the film, however, is its element of
suspense that keeps the viewer guessing at the edge of the seat until the very
end. The film’s nonlinear narrative adds another layer to the overarching
suspense that propels the plot.

A Still from My Birthday Song

My Birthday Song can
best be described as a heady concoction of the old and the new elements of
thrill and suspense. While Hitchcock’s influence on Soni is quite obvious (he
even makes a brief appearance in the film à la Hitchcock), he also seems to
draw inspiration from various contemporary filmmakers including David Fincher (Gone Girl, Fight Club, Seven, Zodiac), Chan-wook
Park (Oldboy, Stoker, Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance), Christopher Nolan (Memento,
Insomnia, The Prestige), and Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian). My Birthday Song employs the
classical montage editing techniques to brilliant effect and despite the
influences comes across as an original film. Sanjay Suri delivers a riveting
performance that may go down as one of the very best of his two-decade-long
career in Bollywood. He gets good support from the ravishing Canadian dancer Nora
Fatehi and Australian beauty Zenia Starr. The film has its share of flaws and
just like other films of its kind it requires the viewers to suspend their
disbelief. Since most of the dialogue is in English the movie is not really
intended for mass viewing. Nonetheless, My Birthday Song is one of the most
refreshing films to have come out of Bollywood in recent times. Hopefully, it will encourage other filmmakers
to try out new things in the days to come.

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Murtaza Ali Khan is an independent film critic / journalist based out of New Delhi, India. He has been writing on cinema for over seven years. He runs the award-winning entertainment blog A Potpourri of Vestiges. He is also the Films Editor at the New York City-based publication Cafe Dissensus and regularly contributes to The Hindu and The Sunday Guardian. He was previously a columnist at Huff Post. He has also contributed to publications like DailyO, Newslaundry, The Quint, Dear Cinema, Desimartini and Jamuura Blog. He regularly appears as a guest panelist on the various television channels and is also associated with radio.